The game has reach. A ball pounds on the asphalt of a ghetto schoolyard and on the asphalt of a suburban driveway. A jump shot fights through winter breezes on an old, struggling farm and through the shawllike heat of an afternoon in the Delta. The game stretched from America into Germany and Lithuania, then gathered in the component nations of what was once Yugoslavia. It touched Nigeria and the Sudan, and it even touched Ireland. That is the reach of The game, here at the beginning of its second century, more than a hundred years after a transplanted Canadian gym teacher hung the peach baskets and began the process of teaching sports how to fly.

The game reaches far and wide. It reaches Christ the King High School in Queens and Summerhill College in Sligo, Ireland. It reaches the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, Rhode Island, and Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. It reaches people there, and maybe that's what ties together Lamar Odom--who was a star at thirteen and a mistrusted gypsy at sixteen and who plays now at the University of Rhode Island, where people look at him and start talking about Magic Johnson--and Michael Bree, a sophomore point guard at Davidson, the first Division I scholarship player from Ireland, who came here the way millions of Irish did before him. They have little in common, yet they are connected by the reach of their sport and by the reach of the only country in which it could have been born, the nation of Louis Armstrong and James Madison, of the Stilt and Larry and M. J., too. An actual nation but also a nation of the soul, a place with connections born of hope and chance, of the possibility that there is something new on the other side of the ocean, a place where history is the future.

Odom and Bree are also connected by the laws of this nation of the soul, the most important of which was put down more than thirty years ago by a black kid named Dean Meminger, whom they called the Dream. He was a star at Rice High School in Harlem, a school named after the founder of the Irish Christian Brothers order, a school that ministered to the children of the extended Irish diaspora. The Dream developed one of the laws of the nation of the soul, a law that was both guide and rule, that explained as much as it demanded, and that measured the great reach of The game. Meminger's Law--a theory of basketball, a history of America.

If you don't play ball, said Dean Meminger, you can't hang out.

On this day, Lamar Odom is not Magic Johnson. In fact, as he gets bounced and buffeted by burly employees of the University of Wisconsin, Lamar Odom is not even Darnell Hillman. He and the Rhode Island Rams find Wisconsin stuck to them like gum to a shoe. Odom and his teammates do some wonderful things. Odom, in particular, seems to operate a few steps ahead of everyone else on the floor. He sees The game the way the great ones see it: deeply, and several plays in advance. He can sense the defense cracking at its subtlest points.

With eleven minutes left in The game, Odom flashes in for a dunk off the left wing, where he seems to begin in Dimension X. You can see on that play what all the fuss has been about, why grown men once afflicted him with their clamorous pursuit, why his high school transcripts once became of interest to a national magazine, and why an ESPN crew is waiting to speak to him after The game. The play gives his team a ten-point lead, even though Odom noisily shanks the ensuing free throw.

However, as is the case with many young teams, URI now plays as though it's so safely ahead on style points that the totals on the scoreboard don't matter. Wisconsin comes plodding back, running its tedious offense, setting its prosaic screens, dropping its commonplace jump shots, and chopping the URI lead to ribbons. Wisconsin wins, 65--59, and the URI players leave the floor baffled, as though they'd bought the mineral rights to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

"Teach us not to break our arms patting ourselves on the back," Odom sighs. "That's college basketball, man. It's a learning experience." He did not play well--ten points, six rebounds--and, at the end, he was not physically strong enough to bring his team back. While his vision and his hands are glorious, Odom tends to "float" on offense, and his defense is not nearly stout enough, because, for now, Odom suffers from what one old coach used to refer to as Joe Tex Disease--to wit, who's going to take the chump with the skinny legs?

This should change. After all, coming into this game, Odom had not played organized basketball in nearly twenty months. In the fall of 1996, he was a senior at Christ the King, where, he admits, by the end of things, he wasn't paying the Daughters of Wisdom much mind. When he learned that he would not be academically eligible to play ball his senior year, Odom bolted upstate, winding up first at Redemption Christian Academy in Troy. He moved from there to St. Thomas Aquinas High School in New Britain, Connecticut. His recruiting choices narrowed to Kentucky and UNLV, in part because he put off a number of schools by announcing that his plans included one year of college ball and then a jump to the NBA. Finally, Odom chose UNLV. It was a mistake. "Putting Lamar in Vegas," says URI assistant Jerry DeGregorio, who coached Odom at Aquinas and who's functioned in recent years as Odom's quasi guardian, "was like locking Orson Welles in a bakery."

Then, in July 1997, Odom found himself included in a Sports Illustrated investigative story regarding systematic fraud on the part of athletes taking the required standardized admission tests. In the story, SI implied there had been a suspicious rise in Odom's score on the ACT. The magazine based its conclusion on a copy of Odom's high school transcripts from Christ the King, which SI claimed it received by anonymous fax. (The story failed to grapple with the fairly compelling issues of a) why confidential student information was being disseminated in the first place, and b) why the NCAA is about the only collegiate authority left that still believes devoutly in standardized tests.) When Odom refused to cooperate with an NCAA investigation into his test scores, his admission to UNLV was rescinded.

Odom flirted with the 1998 NBA draft but wound up at Rhode Island and finished the twenty-four hours of summer-school classes that he needed to become eligible to play this season. (And, yes, URI hired DeGregorio--which admittedly stretches coincidence past its breaking point.) However, Odom also began his career in a position in which everybody in the country believes that they know all about him. Lamar Odom went to three high schools. He's already been putatively in the employ of two colleges. He's been touched by national scandal. He had the temerity to call college basketball's ultimate bluff--that it really is little more than free triple-A ball for the NBA--and the sport struck back at him. For the years 1997 and 1998, it was Lamar Odom's turn to be All That's Wrong with College Basketball.

And now, however it happened, he's eligible to play The game, and ESPN wants him, and Dick Vitale is burbling about him, and people are looking at him and talking about Magic Johnson, and the NCAA may use him to help sell its billion-dollar tournament at the end of the season, provided Odom and the Rams don't blow too many more games to too many more Wisconsins. All may be forgiven. Or at least forgotten.

"Look," says one NBA scout who's come to Rhode Island to watch Odom play, "every time I've talked to the kid, he's been polite and funny and maybe even a little too nice. A lot of people think they can judge him based on what they've heard, but I don't know that any of us are supposed to be the morality police here."

"It hurt me," Odom says. "Of course it did. I did some things I regret, and I know that there are people who think they know me. I've heard the things they say, and some of them are hurtful. All I can tell you is that they don't know me, and that I'm at the point of my life where I have to let them know that I'm not who they think I am." He turns then to go into the little room where ESPN is preparing to make him a star. He is struck by something, and he turns back with a wide, deep smile.

He's wrong, of course. Perception rules some worlds. Some worlds are smaller and quieter. Some worlds perception leaves alone.

Bob mckillop was sitting in the home of the Bree family in the city of Sligo in the county of Sligo on the high Atlantic shoulder of Ireland--deep Yeats country, where the center does not hold and neither can many of the guards shoot--and he thought he was sitting pretty until somebody mentioned the contract.

What contract? asked McKillop.

He'd come on behalf of Davidson College to offer a basketball scholarship to Michael, the youngest of the seven Bree children. McKillop had first heard of Michael Bree when Bree led the Irish junior team to the semifinals of a European junior tournament in Portugal, the furthest any Irish team had ever advanced in a European qualifying round.

A former New York City gym rat, part of the last generation of Irish players who came out of the New York Catholic League, McKillop had become something of an expert in the fairly new field of international recruiting. Davidson wasn't in the running for any of the Lamar Odoms of the world, so McKillop recruited on the edges. As a result, he had assembled a team with a Turkish point guard from California, a Croatian shooting guard, a forward from Sierra Leone who was raised in England, and a forward from Nigeria who played high school ball in Omaha. Now McKillop was prepared to make Michael Bree the first Irish player offered a Division I basketball scholarship. And Riba Bree wanted to know where her son's contract was.

Patiently, McKillop explained to Riba Bree the concept of the letter of intent, the qualifying standards that college athletes must meet, NCAA eligibility rules, and other arcane matters that ambitious American players learn to finesse almost as soon as they learn how to dunk but that are as foreign as wildebeests to the people in Sligo.

The Brees were tumbleweeds, just like all the other generations who'd left Sligo, some of whom landed in New York. Riba was the only child in her family who stayed in Ireland; all six of her brothers left. Michael now has a sister in New York and another one in New Hampshire. Their respective emigrations were conventional. Michael's was unusual. He was gathered in by the reach of The game, and he's come to wander this little college town in North Carolina, where the air smells sweet and warm even as the year runs toward Christmas.

"It's pretty much like Ireland," he says. "I don't know about the South, don't know if it's my type of place, although Davidson is very nice. The South, whether it's the people or not, is very strange to me. It's not my image of the U. S. I was up in New York this summer, visiting my sister in the Bronx. Now, that's my idea of America."

His eyes are bright blue. He has the dark coloration that, according to tradition, was brought to Ireland by the half-drowned sailors of the Spanish Armada, and his face angles into the Irish slouch that launched a thousand bad caricatures. Like most emigrants before him, Bree took something of a leap in the dark when he agreed to come to Davidson.

"I didn't know what to expect," he says. "During the tournament in Portugal, I met this guy, and he said he was going to report about us to colleges in the States. When it happened, I was shocked." Bree got to Davidson in time for the second semester last year. He traveled and practiced with the Wildcats as they went 20--10 and won the Southern Conference, which gained them an NCAA tournament invitation.

His game is athletic but unformed, particularly by American standards. He is fast and an able defender, but he is not as strong as he should be--his case of Joe Tex Disease is even more pronounced than Odom's--and he can be bounced off his man and jockeyed off the ball too easily for a point guard at his level of competition. After all, Bree's high school team practiced twice a week. His club team--the Sligo All Stars, who are something of a dynasty in the limited history of Irish basketball--practiced three times a week. That's not even a good Saturday afternoon for the kids who play in New York.

"I think the biggest revelation to him has been the importance of Division I basketball and how that relates to the level of competition," says McKillop. "The all-encompassing approach to being a skilled player, with weights and film--that's all new to him."

A few days after Lamar Odom and URI got euchred by Wisconsin, Davidson teed it up at home against the magnificently monikered Fightin' Christians of Elon College. It was a November game, and the crowd was sparse. The pep band was a bit thin in the brass section, although it managed to greet the Fightin' Christians with a plucky, if curious, rendition of Ted Nugent's Neander-hormonal anthem, "Cat Scratch Fever," as Davidson's founding Presbyterians likely revolved in their eternal slumber.

Michael Bree got a respectable nineteen minutes behind Ali Ton, the Turkish point guard from California. He knocked down one field goal, handed out two assists--one of them a slick inside feed that got a monstrous dunk for Ben Ebong, the startlingly athletic Nigerian from Omaha--and Davidson got an easy win, its first of the season.

God love him, but Gerald Early was wrong. It is not baseball that stands with jazz and the Constitution as a pure product of America. Baseball's dim origins are European. It is larded with tradition and Tory politics. It is proud that its rules never change.

Basketball, however, found a different way of looking at a game, the same way that James Madison reconfigured government, the same way that Louis Armstrong heard music to which everyone else was deaf. The Constitution, jazz, and basketball are all creatures of the idea of freedom that drew people here--the freedom once denied those people whose journey here was far from voluntary. A republic, if we can keep it. Music, if we can hear it. A game, if we can play it.

"You know," says Michael Bree, the Irishman in North Carolina who plays the same game that Lamar Odom plays in Rhode Island, "I started out playing soccer, and I was pretty good. Then I started playing basketball, and I just liked the people better. Soccer people had sort of an attitude toward themselves. Basketball was more of a team game. I saw the guys playing, and I just wanted to be part of what they were doing. It looked like a lot of fun."

There it is, finally--what unites Lamar Odom and Michael Bree, whose lives were touched by this game in different ways but always for the same reasons--the essence of America, as filtered through Satchmo's horn and Meminger's Law: We play ball, ultimately, so that we can hang out.